Happy Alba this weekend

Finally one of the milestones arrives! This weekend we will (try to) have beam in the storage ring.

Don't misunderstand the "try" in parenthesis, everything is prepared and tested. All the subsystems has been check and recheck preparing the day that we have permission to inject in the second ring, but they never work together like they will do this weekend (other ways this test have already been).

I didn't wrote here when we had the booster commissioning (I had this blog a little abandoned at that time) but yes for the linac's commissioning and first beam.

Looking on the wikipedia's image, the storage ring is the one with the red boxes. the booster is represented with the smaller internal circle and the linac is the straight line in the middle.

Our synchrotron is a bit different because the booster and the storage rings shares the same tunnel. But this doesn't matter in terms of operation (only in terms of installation: a ring cannot be tested when the other is under installation).

There will not be radio frequency in the storage ring (as a first test it is), and this means that after the acceleration of the beam in the booster (from 100MeV given by the linac to the 3GeV of the booster), the beam will have a very short live time. The goal for this weekend is one turn, but 4 sectors will also be great (but more than a turn will be the best). Probably many re-injections will be performed and perhaps some synchrotron light will be seen in the ccds with I'm in charge in the machine diagnostics control.

I like to see this goal accomplished and I have confidence on that. We already demonstrate it in the booster commissioning when the master goal was 600 MeV of acceleration and we reach 2.7GeV a few day before the end of the commissioning.